Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Callie
I don’t know what to expect from Danny Alvarez.
In terms of his attitude toward me, obviously, but also, honestly, in terms of what state the man will be in.
The Danny Alvarez I remember from his playing days was a machine in cleats.
The six photographs that started all of this tell me nothing about what three years have done to him: shot in the dark, seated, profile to the camera.
I’ve spent a month with those pictures and I couldn’t tell you what he looks like standing up in daylight.
On the drive over, Nate gives me the highlight reel and nothing more, anything else, I ask Danny myself.
And I’ve made him a promise I intend to keep to the letter: nothing I know through my association with Nate goes in the article.
No ring auction. No surgery. Not unless Danny puts it on the record himself.
Nate’s highlight reel is brutal in its simplicity: after the cut, Danny was carrying a multimillion-dollar lifestyle without the multimillions, plus surgeries, plus an addiction, and the math did what math does. That’s all Nate said.
Danny and I are practically kindred souls this week, given that I’m also currently supporting a lifestyle, a significantly cheaper one, on no paycheck whatsoever. I’ve decided not to open the interview with that observation.
Nate pulls the SUV up in front of a row of neat townhouses.
The neighborhood’s fine, tidy, ordinary, the kind of street nobody writes about, which after everything might be the point.
He doesn’t get out right away, and when I look over, his hands are on the wheel at ten and two, knuckles pale, and his face is wearing an expression I’ve only ever seen on live television: the tunnel face.
The one he makes in the last thirty seconds before he walks into a stadium.
“Are you okay?” I ask, because of the three people about to be in that townhouse, he should statistically be the calm one.
“I’m fine. Just mentally preparing.” And he opens his door before I can point out that men who are fine don’t grip steering wheels like that, and I follow.
The man who opens the door is Danny Alvarez minus maybe twenty pounds.
Nearly as tall as Nate, running shorts and a sleeveless top, and there’s still real muscle on him, the gym job probably helping, but it’s a working man’s build now, not a professional weapon.
Dark hair pushed back, blue eyes that do a full assessment of me in the doorway before they’ve decided anything.
“Hey, man.” Nate steps in, and there’s the hand-clasp, the half-embrace, the back pound, the whole dialect of it, while I stand on the welcome mat like I’m selling Girl Scout cookies.
“Hi. I’m Callie,” I say, eventually, when it becomes clear no one is going to rescue me.
“Oh, I know who you are.” Not hostile. Not friendly. A door held open with the chain still on. “Come on in.”
His place is neat, but unlike Nate’s sterile showroom, there are signs a human actually lives here.
Not many, but they’re also telling: a workout bag by the door, two plates drying in the rack, a hoodie tossed over the couch arm.
And on the kitchen counter, a framed photo, college-aged Danny in a burnt-orange Longhorns jersey, arm around an older Hispanic woman whose face is somewhat similar to his but also different.
His mom, has to be. I file the jersey away too: two boys from the same Odessa streets, one to Austin, one to College Station.
That rivalry must have been a whole saga of its own.
“It’s early for beer, but I can do coffee?”
“I have never refused coffee in my life,” I say, and hear the nerves in my own voice. “Today is not the day I start.”
I don’t know why I’m nervous. That’s a lie, I know exactly why.
I’ve been interviewing people since the high school paper; the mechanics are muscle memory.
I’m nervous because it matters. Three years ago the article mattered too, it felt like justice for a dead rookie and every kid still at risk, but I didn’t know a single person in it.
It was facts about strangers. This is facts again, checked and double-checked, but the facts are about people I care for now: Nate, and by extension the man handing me coffee, a man I still feel I owe something I’ve never been able to name.
And underneath both of them, one more party with a stake: my career, the real one, the one I’m three days from either resurrecting or burying for good.
Danny comes back with three mugs and a bowl he’s filled with sugar packets and creamers, hosting, in the dialect of a man whose mother raised him right, and folds himself into the armchair across from me.
“Just so we’re clear: not a fan, Callie Carter.”
Very different opening than Grant, who started reserved and warmed by the hour. This has an undertone with a pulse. “However.” He tips his mug toward Nate. “This loser seems to like you. And it seems to be about more than your pretty eyes.”
Nate clears his throat with tremendous dignity.
“Relax. If I were flirting with her, you’d know, because she’d dump your stupid ass on the spot in my favor.
” The two of them laugh, the old laugh, the one with two decades of friendship in it, and I permit myself a smile at reduced volume, being the enemy and all.
“So,” Danny says, settling back. “Ask your questions.”
“Right.” I set up the laptop and lay my phone on the coffee table. “Ground rules. From this point, everything you say is on the record. If you want something off the record, say so, I pause the recording, you talk, and it never existed.”
“Fine. But I read the final piece before you publish it.”
Neither Grant nor Nate asked for that. Danny’s the one with the most skin left to lose, so it’s also the most reasonable request in the room.
“Deal, with one condition of my own. I’m writing against a clock, so when I send you the final version, your notes come back fast. And editorial changes happen only if something’s factually wrong.
I’m trying to beat outlets running a very different kind of story. ”
“Deal.” He sets down the mug. “What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about these.” I slide the phone across, screen up, showing the six photographs that rearranged all of our lives.
“Not much to tell.” He barely glances at them, which tells me he’s been thinking about the night that brought us here.
“A friend called, asked if I wanted to go out for drinks. I went out for drinks. Drinks turned into more. At some point I realized I was in no shape to drive, I was drunk and I was high, so I called Nate, and he came and got me. He hung around a while and chatted with the people at the table, which I figure is when the pictures got taken. Then we left.”
I glance at Nate. He nods, once. I’d told him on the drive that I was worried Danny might sand the story down, protect Nate, protect Grant, protect the locker room.
Nate told me not to worry about it. I’m starting to see why.
There’s nothing performed in this room. Danny Alvarez has moved past the country where image lives.
“When did the drugs start,” I ask, “and why?”
He gives me a look, the are-you-seriously-asking look, and then, to his credit, he answers it seriously anyway.
“Season before my last one. My knee had been talking to me for a while, nothing dramatic. I was mobile, I could load it, my numbers didn’t dip. So I said nothing to anyone.”
“Why?”
“Because if I tell Coach, Coach tells the trainer, and the trainer wants an X-ray or an MRI. And maybe it’s nothing, like I said, I was performing.
But what if it’s the start of something?
” He lets the question sit, because he knows I know it’s the whole story in miniature.
“Then late in the season I take a tackle and I feel a pop, and I knew. I knew right then I was fucked. But I got up, and it took weight, and it felt, stable enough, under a truly impressive amount of pain. Told the trainer and Coach I was fine. They rubbed some topical on it. After the game they wanted to look at it; I refused. ‘I’m good, must’ve been a spasm.
' And then I just… kept playing. Managed it myself, over-the-counter stuff, which did nothing, but it was legal, and I could grit through. At that point my only sin was silence.”
My only sin was silence. The sentence goes through me like a current, and I keep my face journalist-still and do not look at Nate, and the effort costs me.
“Off-season came, felt a little better, less load, no games. I knew nothing had healed. I let myself believe otherwise; belief is free. Then the new season started, and the pressure came back, and the pain came back bigger, until running felt like tearing and the knee started giving sideways. So I went to Stevens.”
The name lands in my stomach the way it always does.
Marcus Stevens, head trainer — I put his name in print three years ago; I know his employment history, his certifications, the date he was fired.
What I never had, what no document could give me, was this: what it sounded like when a player walked into his office and asked.